


The Nature of Humanity

by EmilArchangelNemisis_Tardis_Pantalaemon7



Category: Humans areSpace Orcs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:28:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23649955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmilArchangelNemisis_Tardis_Pantalaemon7/pseuds/EmilArchangelNemisis_Tardis_Pantalaemon7
Summary: A Tylorian scientist thinks back on his species interactions with humans and what their abilities might mean for the future of his race. Who are they really?





	The Nature of Humanity

Humans have the surrealability to see things before they happen. At first our scientists didn’t believe it, but years of experimenting on the few human captives we had and observations in the field, rewatched on the footage our soldiers had lost their lives to acquire proved it to be true. This was not as some feared some great supernatural ability of the gods, though humans still have that reputation, but the result of the fact that human brains are great processing machines and were, it seemed, capable of predicting and showing events before they happened. Up to 0.8 of a second ahead, in fact. which is why when we fired something at a human the human was already in motion to avoid it, they literally saw it coming. It seemed they weren’t even aware they were doing it, taking their extraordinary speed for granted.

When the first humans were discovered hiding amongst our numbers there was extraordinary panic. As if crushing our cities like fragile glass wasn’t enough, they were now capable of hiding amongst us! For a time no one knew who they could trust. Before the humans had been barbarians, but their ability to perfectly mimic our motions and sounds and to learn through simple observation how to be amongst our most trusted members, well it was almost more terrifying then all their raining stars put together.

The human voice was capable of an extraordinary range of sounds and easily able to accommodate our range and more, they learned fast and were, like us, social animals, enough so to be able to read our responses to them and alter their behaviour accordingly.

I had grown up during this time, heard horror stories whilst sheltering in the ruins of our once glorious civilisation and this of all of them, scared, and I admit, intrigued me the most. That any person however loved could turn out to be nothing, but a cold monster underneath. I saw how our ignorance destroyed us, I learned the value of information in war. Things that would surely have destroyed one of our kind did not even slow a human. They could be killed, of course, I’d seen them, dead with their pink and red bloody limbs splayed grotesquely over a large area like a squashed bug. I never felt sorry for them, they weren’t like us. So I had come to study them, to learn about them, taking my knowledge from one band of fighters to the next, always on the move, always learning.

I was the one who learned to use their predictive response against them. If you wanted to test whether someone was human or not, you need simply throw a piece of fruit at them. A Tylorian would flinch in surprise when it hit them, then look down at it confused or glare at you for your insolence. A human would catch it. They didn’t seem able to help themselves, an involuntary response, one we could use. The captured humans, whilst clearly capable of imitating our tongue, never talked once captured. It was hard enough to capture them since it took so many Tylorian to take down a single human. Typically if a human was suspected we would clear the area of young ones and declare a human zone which would keep most well away whilst we attempted to bring the human down. Though young myself I insisted on staying to observe and learn. We tortured the humans of course, we needed all the information we could get and no one felt well inclined towards them at this point. It wasn’t until I heard a story from an elderly female scientist a couple of years later about how a captive human had screamed when she, quite accidentally, dropped burning sulphur on them, that I realised nothing we were doing to them had likely hurt them at all. Chemicals which would put a Tylorian in agony did not penetrate their thick skin, (which, unnervingly, turned out to be mostly dead), harm their digestive tract or otherwise damage them in anyway. We did not use fire, it was seen as too unpredictable and dangerous, (not that that seemed to stop the humans who seemed to have an affinity with it), and sharp objects and needles were stabbed randomly and inexorably into them, which did get a reaction, however I have come to the conclusion that nothing we did to the humans could come close to comparing to what they did to each other. In a rare moment of insight a Tylorian fighter had escaped capture by humans by running back through their ship, and he remains to this day one of the few Tylorian to ever survive having done so, on the way through he was horrified to see a naked human lying on a bed stuck through with thousands and thousand of metal needles. What makes this even more unnerving is that the human was engaged in social interaction with another human who was inserting the needles into its flesh. When shown various videos of human responses after the fact our young Tylorian fighter positively identified the social signals humans had been giving off as being their equivalencies of ‘laughter’ and ‘smiling’. He was quite certain. Most unnerving. I will not soon forget the horror on that young captain’s face when he talked of it and it is an episode I often recall in my lectures on humans as a species since it has never failed to impress upon the young (younger than me at any rate) the vital importance of tackling humans as a species.

When the humans left and things settled down I became a scientist, dedicated my life to studying these things, taking notes, making sure, in my own small way, that they would never desecrate our planet again, dedicated myself to killing them.

Katey had grander ideas then that. Whilst our space exploration program had been kick started by the invasion we were still a long way off from being able to go very far, even our atmosphere was unattainable at this point, but what bothered Katey was that no one knew where the humans had gone or why. Why had they come in the first place? Destruction was my resentful murmur and I wasn’t the only one. Our makeshift telescopes were at least enough to know they weren’t visible near us anymore. It did not comfort me when she pointed out they could just be hiding behind one of our moons ready to stike out at any moment. No Katey wasn’t satisfied with defending our planet, what Katey wanted was to know WHY. Where had the humans come from? What world shaped them? They had fast reactions, could it be that they were hunted on their world? I snorted when she propounded the idea to me. Humans were clearly predators. Yet they had a startle reaction, she told me and showed me the combat video to prove it. Maybe on their world things weren’t so simple. She wanted to understand them, really understand their motives and ambitions. I could see the use of it, being able to predict their movements as they could apparently predict the movement of a projectile through the air would be useful, if we knew what they wanted we knew what they would do, but to me it also seemed somewhat futile, I believed them to be outside our comprehension, so other from us that to understand them from our such different vantage point seemed dangerous, risky and quite possibly, a waste of time.

\----

But for all my knowledge, and theories, and fear, I underestimated them. They didn’t disappear at all. The young liked to claim we fought them off, but it was obvious to those of us who were there that was never true, all our heroism counted for nothing right up until the day they left. They did retreat behind a moon after all, perhaps not literally, but they might as well have. Perhaps something about our civilisation appealed to them, perhaps they were testing to see if we were worth the trouble of infiltrating, but they left us alone for a few years, not long enough to forget and we were certainly not lax in our preparations for their return should that ever happen, but after a few decades of no infiltrators having been identified people began to hope that they had all left on the ships, we wanted to trust each other again. It was then that the humans, so slowly, very very carefully began inserting one, then two, then more of their own amongst our people. Of course this was only something I found out later. Much later. Let me tell you about that day.

Katey came to sit opposite me in the cafeteria, a frown etched on her face. She was usually in a world of her own so I knew something was bothering her. She asked me to recount the story of the man full of needles, she had heard the story a thousand times so I knew she was looking for something specific. Once I finished I hoped she’d tell me what it was, but when she continued to from I asked.

“Do you think…” She hesitated. “I mean if they harm each other, could there be different factions? Perhaps one faction attacked us and we could ally with another against them, if we really needed too.”

I chocked on my food.

“If we really needed too," she hurried to add. "Don’t get me wrong the work you’ve been doing here is great, we are much better prepared than we were, but still centuries behind them developmentally. It might be necessary.”

“We’d be signing our own death warrants."

“They can learn..."

“They can’t **become** us no matter how they learn. Not inside."

She frowned again, but nodded. Eyes focused over my shoulder somewhere deep in thought.

Later that day we were attending one of our regular cabinet meetings. The new president, Lady Ellish, was a beautiful and intelligent woman, she was not so war hardened a general as our previous leader, but she was no fool either. She knew the importance of defending ourselves as well as anyone, but since there had been no stirrings in outer space for a couple of decades now she took a more longterm approach to defence, developing it alongside rebuilding our civilisation, rather than instead of it as General Wagmen had.

The wealth our new fledgling society could spare went to research as much as to defence and, while these day, that was really two sides of the same coin it was good to see new houses going up, new buildings being established and a tentative reestablishment of the old shops and commerce I had once taken for granted in my childhood. Katey graced me with a small smile as she came in. I still thought she looked rather out of sorts and was a little worried about her, usually so cheery, she was fiddling with a small spinning top that served as her focus for these long, often arduous meetings. Our new discoveries, once flowing thick and fast, had slowed a considerable pace with no new information on the humans to be collated and our space industry was still a work in progress so this meeting promised to flow by with little real need for our contribution.

\----

As we stood up to leave, but before anyone had actually left the room Katey spoke up quickly “Madam Ellish”, the lady turned towards her,

“Yes Katey?”

Katey threw the spin top at the president. She caught it straight out of the air. Everyone froze, everyone stared at her. She herself seemed to be staring at the top in her hand in some shock.

“… Establish a human zone, boundary 3 clicks in all directions.”

“There is no need for that, I’ll come quietly.”

“And no flying over either, got it?” I finished glaring at her. Ready to run, ready to fight, though she did not seem about to move I would not be fooled into thinking she was harmless. I'd seen too many of them.

She turned to Katey, “How did you know?”

I didn’t want Katey to answer that, to give her more ammunition, but Katey looked her straight in the eye and almost whispered “The pipes.”

“Ah”. Lady Ellish nodded apparently knowing exactly what she was talking about.

Lord Hanscombe with his eyes still on Ellis opened the door and led some guards forward a few steps before stepping back, commanding “Take her”. He had obviously told them what was going on at the door and been tested himself, because they all bore ropes and nets of the sort used to bind humans. They approached cautiously, leaving a wide perimeter around Ellish, though somewhat hindered by the table between them. She gave a wry smile Or rather, I thought, she imitated the action a Tylorian would call a wry smile, none of her movements were natural, not any more, all learned and practiced, all to give an impression, and said “I will come quietly.”

They leapt forward all the same, the force of their momentum barely jostled her and cold lightening ran my spine to settle in my stomach. It was one thing to know, it was still unnerving to see. To have to rewrite years of working together and knowing this woman to account for the fact of her… humanity.

She didn’t even flinch as they bound her and walked her out. My movements were stiff as we walked her past all the staff, many of whom stood up as we approached. They were thinking 'This is a coup', I supposed and felt almost ashamed, but they would learn the truth soon enough.

\-----

We had secure cells beneath the offices and it wasn’t long till Ellis was bound on one side of a table in an interrogation chamber.

Ellish shifted restless, it was unnerving to see our former president displaying the symptoms ofrestless aggression that so haunted our nightmares. It made me feel sick. I suppose she felt there was no need to give so perfect an imitation of our species now we knew the truth.

She sighed, “What do you wish to know?”

“That’s it? Just like that, you’re going to answer our questions?"

“You slaughtered our people."

“That wasn’t us,” she interrupted harshly.

“You’re human!"

“Yes, I’m human, but there **are** different kinds of humans. Or didn’t your research tell you that?!"  
I sat down seething, eyes fixed ready for action, not that I thought I could do much against so fast a moving species.

“The ship that came here was banished from our solar system because of its use of extreme violence. By the time most humans became aware that it had attacked a sentient civilisation, it was too late. That faction was forced to withdraw, but we knew from observations of your world that you already hated us. We did not think diplomatic negotiations would be an option."

“So you chose to spy on us instead.” I didn’t believe a word of it, there was more going on here, and if humans were factious than no doubt we were but another piece in their political jostling. It at least explained when Madam Ellis got her experience with political jockeying.

“We chose to learn. You have spent time stying us, and the other faction wasn’t likely to tell us anything about you. We need to see for ourselves. We did some spying from space, it’s true. Listened to your radio signals, observed you technological developments etcetera."

“Why shouldn’t we kill you?"

“Firstly because you won’t learn anything from me that way, secondly because I am far from the only undercover human on this planet and thirdly, because I have a warship parked just the other side of your sun.”

“You think you can really work with us now we know what you are."

“Yes."

Her gaze was so un-Tylorianly unnerving that it could not have been clearer what she was. Was this the gaze that had won so many politicians over to supporting her bid for the residency? Did any of them know what she was? Did she threaten them?

“I am not a soldier, I am a diplomat."

It occurred to me then that we’d never spoken with a human before, not truly. The captured had always refused to speak and I'd felt that their parroting of our language and manners was a sort of instinctive mirroring that fell apart when the pretence was gone, but now... Here one was genuinely understanding us, talking with us, trying to reason with us even. Though clearly from a very different perspective than our own. And more of them hidden out amongst us somewhere? How were we supposed to deal with that? Was Katey herself one and this business with the pipes was a simple diversion? Was this their was of announcing their presence to the world in spectacular fashion? Why though? To intimidate us? No, even with our defences as they are they would still win in a straight up fight. They must want us for something, we have a value to them alive…

No, Katey was too nice, too genuine to be human, I would not believe it of her. That said, there was turning out to be even more to these humans than we’d thought…


End file.
